1). Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system and method of processing a charge.
2). Discussion of Related Art
A consumer who shops for goods or services online may often be given the option to use a selection of payment sources during checkout, such as payment by credit card, debit card, payment from an account held by an institution, or to charge for a purchase on a mobile phone bill. When a consumer selects a charge to their phone bill, a merchant server instructs a billing server which is aligned with a carrier server to carry out the charge. The billing server usually communicates with a consumer mobile phone to confirm the charge before placing the charge on the phone bill at the carrier server.
The billing server may have to communicate with multiple merchant servers and multiple carrier servers. Because of unique communication requirements of each separate merchant server, additional merchant-specific code may have to be created and uploaded at the billing server each time that another merchant server is added to allow for such unique communication. This code will have to be added simply in order to process a charge, although more code will have to be added that is specific to the new merchant server in order to process charges that fail, control consumer opt-in, identify carriers, process refunds, etc.